I attended Texas A&M for undergrad about a decade ago and did a "leadership exchange" program with the Qatar branch campus, so it surprised me to see this on the HN front page. I'm at an airport waiting on a flight with a few hours to kill, so I thought I would share some thoughts and memories of the experience.

I am not keyed into Texas A&M politics so I couldn't say why this is happening now, though the increasing instability of the Middle East region is as likely reason as any. Texas A&M is one of the most overtly conservative public schools in the country, with the physics building named after the guy who invented fracking and the school is the home to the George H.W. Bush Presidential library. My thinking is that the increasing association of Qatar and Al Jazeera with the left generally probably upset the very vocal alumni networks over the last few years, especially lately. Take a look at TexAgs for a sense of how Qatar is viewed within the Aggie community https://texags.com/search?q=qatar.

The leadership exchange program was that a dozen or so students from the Qatar branch campus flew to the main College Station campus for a week and then we all flew over to Qatar and they showed us around the Qatar branch campus for a week. I want to say it happened over spring break and it was all expenses paid by the schools, very much in the spirit of building a bridge between the very distant campuses.

The first week, we happily showed the Qatar branch students around and had fun showing them the campus and America for the first time. We answered a lot of questions about America and it honestly wasn't so memorable to me. I can't say I took it that seriously, for me it was just another whatever week on campus with some extracurricular activities with new people.

When we flew over there though, we all lost our shit immediately though. We had never in our lives seen as much concentrated wealth as any of us did in that one week period. For example, the colors of Texas A&M are maroon and white, and they love those colors, everything is maroon and white on campus, it's a huge deal there and they take pride in it. Anyway, the Qatar branch campus imported tons and tons of pink marble to be used in a bunch of buildings, because that shade of pink marble was the closest to maroon that they could find. The bathrooms were full of pink marble. It's hard to convey the scale of it and I wish I had taken more pictures but the marble alone blew us away.

The joke among the American students quickly became how poor we were and how poorly we had treated the visiting Qatari students. We were put into the Sharq hotel, a five star hotel in Doha. I think the school had put the Qatari students in like Holiday Inn or something, it just didn't compare. At breakfast at the Sharq in the mornings, there was often an African man in full military fatigues that made him like a general, reading the newspaper, surrounded by a retinue of beautiful women, also dressed in full military fatigues.

That week was my first time experiencing real serious jet lag and it surely contributed to the total surreal experience of the whole thing. One morning they announced that they were taking us to the Pearl, the man made islands they were constructing and showed it all off to us. We walked around and saw all the advertisements for luxury brands everywhere. Again, hard to convey how surreal it was walking around a giant luxury paradise, when we were giving the Qatari students tours of the dining halls a week prior.

Simply put, Qatar had and has too much oil money. This was in 2011 or so I think and the Shah had somewhat recently put out Vision 2025, the royal family's plan to transition the economy away from oil extraction and processing and into literally anything else. They were all very aware that the oil could well run out one day and to maintain the absurdly high standard of living for Qatari citizens, they needed to diversify their income streams. However, that is hard to do when things are good, so they have been trying to make it happen from top down with mixed success at best.

Qatar as a society was clearly stratified into those in the very large royal family, Qatari citizens, and migrant workers. Students on the program with us were from the royal family, though only distant cousins, and there were many regular Qatari citizens on the trip as well. One of the Qatari citizens told a few of us in private about how their family had their homes raided because they were suspected of practicing a non Islamic religion and how difficult it was to try to advance in society without ties to the royal family.

One of the most arresting moments in my life came during a tour of the student dorms that were under construction. They were always building everywhere, aggressively investing the excess oil money into anything they could imagine. As we went through the building, the tour guide stopped in one of the rooms under heavy construction and we found ourselves face to face with a bunch of migrant workers. I have never felt more distant from someone on a human level than when I looked into the eyes of the migrant worker then. We both have blue eyes, I remember that, but otherwise, I felt that our human experience on earth was so far apart as to render me quiet for an hour or two afterwards. Qatar had just announced that they had been selected for the 2022 World Cup when we were visiting, and for the next ten years civil rights groups pointed out the harms done to these workers as they built the World Cup stadium.

We were driven in Land Rovers over sand dunes, had a huge dinner in the dessert, got to see somebody flip a huge Maqluba with what seemed like a whole goat in it. We visited a market and the students haggled on our behalf with the merchants. I picked up a silver ceremonial dagger for my dad that he still loves to show off and a stainless steel metal necklace for myself that I wear when I got out salsa dancing. I held a falcon and bought one of the little falcon hats for myself as a souvenir. I learned that called everything "Haram" is actually really funny and sort of a "that's what she said" joke for some in Islamic cultures.

The Qatar branch admin tried to pitch us on studying abroad at the campus for a year, they would love to have us. I asked the Qatari students about this, and they said that there was rampant cheating in the classes, with Royal family members able to get away with just about anything. They also said there was no alcohol allowed and you would get kicked out if found consorting with a member of the opposite sex. Didn't really give studying abroad there much thought after all that. My professors in College Station all said they weren't much impressed by their Qatari colleagues, saying going there was a form of early retirement.

To wrap it up as I get nearer boarding this flight, Doha and the Texas A&M Qatar campus was unlike any other place I have ever been on earth. Staggering levels of wealth and inequality, wildly different culturally yet trying to become the same. Highly recommend a visit if you can swing it before it closes, if only for the perspective you'll walk away with, even better if you are a current student and can get them to pay for the whole thing.